Featured Image: Collecting Strong Lenses

You’re looking at just a handful (click here to see a few more!) of the 1,210 strong gravitational lens candidates newly discovered in a recent study that analyzed data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Surveys. Strong gravitational lensing occurs when light from a background source bends around a massive foreground object (like a galaxy). This bending smears the light from the background source into arcs, rings, and multiple images. In a study led by Xiaosheng Huang (University of San Francisco), scientists have now used trained neural networks to search the DESI data for new strong gravitational lensing systems, finding a treasure trove of candidates. The new discoveries dramatically extend our set of known strong lens systems — in 2018, when the first iteration of this project began, there were only a few hundred confirmed strong lenses. To read more about the project and its results, check out the original article below.